Author, Musician, Researcher, Educator, Exiled Brooklynite

architecture

2011.06.09

A few days ago, I gave a keynote speech at DMY Berlin's Copy/Culture Symposium. The subject was the ethics of configurable culture, and the ways in which our cultural norms and expectations are increasingly more complex than -- and in conflict with -- our intellectual property laws.

Although the presentation drew on themes I've discussed in previously published work and presentations, it featured brand new qualitative and quantitative data from a survey I recently fielded with Mark Latonero and Marissa Gluck. My audience was largely design professionals, so I tried to keep the academic jargon to a minimum.

2011.04.27

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at TEDxUSC, in which I laid out the basic argument for MondoNet, a new project I'm working on with a few of my grad students at Rutgers. My basic point is that, despite the many amazing cultural, economic and political uses to which it's been put, the Internet has a fundamental flaw preventing it from being an effective tool for democratic political action and cultural innovation.

The flaw lies in its centralized architecture and hierarchical governance; no matter how much people resist against institutional power through innovative cultural forms, and no matter how much we lobby against oppressive and exploitative uses of the technology (e.g. the current battles over net neutrality), the network provides its operators with an excess of power that will necessary be exploited.

We propose to remedy this situation with an architectural intervention: namely, using ad-hoc, mesh networking technology to create a global network that is fundamentally resistant to censorship, surveillance and exploitation, because no single individual or institution can control the information flow on any significant scale.

Clearly, there is a lot to discuss here; we plan to publish a full-length academic article in The Information Society in July, and a pre-publication copy can be read at MondoNet.org. But we're still working on developing funding and fleshing out the engineering, so I welcome your feedback, criticisms and offers of help!

2010.05.19

Finding the optimal balance between liberty and efficiency has always been an element of social theory and planning, and obviously, there's no objectively perfect spot on the curve. Some of us prefer a cleaner, safer, more efficient city, others prefer the chaos and tumult of a more organic sprawl. Either way, perfection is impossible to define, much less to achieve.

Not so in SimCity 3000. As it turns out, despite the intentional open-endedness of this virtual city planning software, it is possible to "beat" the game by developing an optimal algorithm.

Vincent Ocasla, a 22-year-old Philippino architecture student, spent 4 years working to accomplish exactly this task, and by all appearances, he succeeded. Technically speaking, he built the "perfect" city within the possibility space of the game's software.

Of course, few of us would ever want to live in his fictional city of Magnasanti, and fortunately, there's no place remotely like it on earth today. But as professional-grade versions of software like SC3k become increasingly prevalent tools for architects, city planners, policy wonks and other engineers of our social environment, the risks of such a city -- and such a society -- being built seem less and less remote.

The danger isn't necessarily in some 21st century dictator forcing us to live in a grid of his or her own design. Instead, the danger resides in our collective blindness to the limits of our tools, our societal inability to see the invisible walls we erect for ourselves when our tools are both too complex for us to understand fully and too logic-based to allow for happy accidents and other perversions of intent.

I'm not saying that we should abandon software for quill and parchment -- simply saying that we need people like Ocasla to keep us honest. Without the hackers, the tinkerers, and the obsessives to show us where our tools will lead, we can never hope to understand the future consequences of our actions.

2009.07.27

Some really creative folks in Germany used a high-definition digital projector to produce amazing trompe l'oeil effects on the side of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The animation takes its cue from the gridlike pattern on the face of the building, and builds from there.